Threadworms, From the Archives: Ann Rower

Heather and Hobe

Words by Ann Rower

Illustrations by Samantha Rosenwald

TW: Suicide and mania

(AS SEEN IN worms 6)

The strangest thing, until this very moment of making a few small edits on this piece, so that it would fit the word count Clem needed for her Worms magazine, it never occurred to me to even wonder, not even for a moment, what would have happened–would things have turned out differently, completely different–if Heather, that is Heather Lewis one of the great writing talents of our time and my girlfriend, and I had not decided to abandon NYC forever. We thought at the time, exactly one year to the day before 9/11 changed everything for us all–all us New Yorkers anyway–to move out to this funky little high desert town in the southeastern corner of Arizona on the Mexican border. Would Heather never had a complete devastating breakdown, practically taking the whole town down with her, eventually returning to New York right after 9/11, and ultimately 6 months later hanging herself the weekend of the 2002 Kentucky Derby, the same day–we think–the review of my book, Lee and Elaine got a whole ½ page, shall we say, “mixed” review in the Sunday Times. Would none of that terrible stuff have ever happened, would we have been celebrating instead of grieving? Would Heather still have been whole? Was she ever?

Samantha Rosenwald

Looking back, though, I can remember exactly when it started. Heather and I and Peyton and Frank were out at Adam and Tim’s ranch in the valley, near where Peyton lived. Peyton is Peyton Smith, a great star and a little bit the diva of the Wooster Group, who had abandoned the theatre and New York City the year before we did, and was our inspiration for our destination. Before dinner Heather and Frank went off for a long walk through the tumbleweeds. When they came back Heather was beaming with happiness. She was so happy that night, all through the lovely evening meal we all had. I have a photo I took of the five of them–Heather, Frank, Peyton, Tim and Adam–with their backs to the camera looking out as the sun was setting over the high desert still in full spring bloom. I’ll never forget Heather saying as we were driving back home to our little miners shack on Moon Canyon, “You know, for the first time in my life, I really think I could be happy.” But it was the beginning of mania, just starting to rise up from the dark place it was lurking for a long time, staying, waiting for just that moment, the monster, her monster, to pounce. “Oh no you won’t,” it growled. “You can not be happy. Never be happy,” it hissed. It was not happiness she was feeling, it was the mania talking. Just beginning. It was the beginning of the end.

Frank was a great cook, a gorgeous man who Heather had a huge crush on. That last night in Bisbee, Frank cooked. He made pasta puttanesca without garlic in deference to my stomach. After dinner I remember going out the side door to have a cigarette–yes I’d started smoking–and soon Amy came out to join me. “Can I bum one?” she said. Apparently, at least for the moment, she’d started smoking too. Amy was there because I’d called her to come out and rescue me from the punishing effects of Heather’s full blown mania just a few months after her pronouncement about maybe, finally for the first time, being able to be really happy. The sun was just setting over the desert I had fallen in love with. We sat on the low concrete stoop. Amy took one look at me and put her arm around me as I started to cry, “I can't believe I’m just leaving her all alone in the middle of the desert, a raving lunatic in the middle of a nervous breakdown,” I wept. After a little while we went back inside and had dessert. I remember the next morning when I got dressed, I tucked my white shirt into my jeans. I never did that before.  “You look nice,” Peyton said. I couldn't believe I was going home. Heather was so manic that she actually told Amy and I that she thought it was a great idea that I was leaving her and going back to New York City with Amy. Amy is a great packer. I still have a little sample sized bottle of Creme de la Creme body lotion from Kiehls that she prepared me, with duct tape around the cap so it wouldn't explode on the plane! 

But later in the summer, once I was back in New York, I resigned myself to bouncing around from one secret location to another to keep Heather from finding out my whereabouts. I did anything to keep her from reaching me when she was at her craziest, blowing pot smoke into the cat’s mouth, painting the window and door frames of the great house on Nighthawk with her own shit; you know classic crazy, until Heather finally got herself arrested for some dumb thing with the Saab and some woman poet she met in the mental hospital. But the strangest thing happened. As soon as Heather went to jail, the mania vanished. Completely disappeared. I was working behind the scenes but Amy was really trying hard to deal with the staff at the jail and the nearby hospital in Tucson, along with our friend Adam who had a lot of personal experience with mental hospitals. We tried to see if we could get her transferred directly from the jail to the hospital long term. Of course, this meant getting in touch with her “real” family, as opposed to her “local gay” family: me, Amy and Adam. As soon as Hobe was informed–had to be informed–he wanted to come out to Bisbee to see her, though he was blind as a bat. He wanted to help her. He still loved her, of course, in his fashion. Hobe of course is Hobart Lewis, CEO of Reader’s Digest, and of course, Heather’s father; the grand villain of the piece, of all the pieces she ever wrote, every interview she ever gave, every thought she had, every breath she took, who tried to stick his tongue as far down her throat as he possibly could every chance he ever got, at least until the mania kicked in. As soon as he found out she was in trouble he started sending her money immediately, much to the rest of the family’s dismay and disapproval of course. And, of course, we had to call Tim, her next next of kin, her baby brother, and get him involved but he refused to bring Hobe out to Arizona, which Hobe begged him to do, wisely I suppose, probably picturing Hobe hanging on to Tim’s arm desperately, stumbling across the desert. But then, Tim ended up somehow spending a lot of time on the phone with the jail and hospital shrink, alas, to no avail. And with Amy. They even became momentarily close in the process. I remember hearing, from Amy I guess, that Tim said to her after sharing that he too was gay, he thought that, “It’s such a shame that we’re meeting like this. Under other circumstances, we might have been great friends.” 

After the summer was over, after the mania was over, after the Twin Towers collapsed–I always thought of Heather as the Third Twin–and I brought her back to New York, we made a few trips up to Bedford, New York to visit Hobe. It was very difficult. He was now living in a nice little condo by himself, I guess at a certain point the Lewis’ had to give up the mansion they could never afford. This was all after he retired from running Readers Digest in the nearby town of Pleasantville, which always struck me as a darkly hilarious name for such a creepy place. At least I always thought it was creepy. Actually, I think I must have gotten that from my father who was, until Stalin invaded Poland (some things never change) a bit of a red, and I don't mean a Republican. My father always said he thought Reader’s Digest was a CIA front. It wasn't just commie gossip, I’m sure. My father knew about things like that. 

Samantha Rosenwald

Incest was not Hobe’s only crime. He was President Nixon’s confidante and bag-man. I remember Heather told me he carried millions of dollars in cash in a suitcase to Cambodia at a time when no one was allowed to go to Cambodia because it was too dangerous with the Khmer Rouge for Nixon during Watergate. He brought Heather back a lovely painting of two horses on a gold background by a local Cambodian artist. It was beautiful, kind of primitive. Of course one of the other things Hobe loved about Heather was how well she rode, especially her jumping. He followed her riding career faithfully and intently. The little painting–it was on wood–was an acknowledgement from him to her to say he knew how much she loved horses, as you know if you read House Rules. It was small and could easily fit in the suitcase once the cash had been transferred to god knows who. And why Cambodia? We always wondered but of course we couldn't really ever ask. It’s sitting right over there on my shelf where I can see it from my bed, right next to a lovely old snapshot of Heather at 16 in full dress riding gear, complete with a velvet hat and a beautiful leather riding crop which she probably was loathe to ever use. Hobe was one of the few Watergate participants who never got exposed. Heather researched his involvement in the whole thing and his relationship with Nixon. I remember she told me Nixon once came to visit the Lewis family in their big house in Bedford. Hobe insisted on dressing Heather who was maybe nine at the time (almost ripe!) in a white sailor suit, and how she stood proudly at the door to say goodbye to the not yet disgraced President of the United States and saluted! Heather found tapes at the library, I guess the famous Nixon tapes and any number of Hobe in conversation with Nixon. Her favourite was the one of Hobe and the President chatting away, which must have happened right after that visit to Bedford in which Nixon signed off fondly referring to the little girl in the sailor suit, “Give my regards to the admiral.” 

Maybe because he was sending her money every month, Heather felt obliged to try to have some contact with him so we rented a car a few times. Until her breakdown, Heather always did the driving whenever we went anywhere, even until her breakdown in Arizona in the blue Saab convertible we bought for $7000. There were many days when she just took off in the car by herself, heading to Sierra Vista to shop at Target. But by now she was too weak, too unsure of herself, or too scared to do almost anything, let alone navigate a big heavy Swedish car. The saddest part was we never even put the top down. Not once. We sold it to friends for a meagre thousand bucks before we both flew out to Bisbee for Thanksgiving in November 2001 with Peyton and the gang. Heather may have even pulled herself together enough to make her specialty sweet potatoes and marshmallows, the only time she ever did anything remotely like that in all the time between Twin Towers and her death. Maybe it was because we were back in Bisbee. Maybe it was for Frank’s benefit. I remember Frank confided in me that he was repulsed by the lesbian sex in House Rules which made me despise him when I tried to get everyone in Bisbee to read her book. The only one who loved House Rules was Bonnie, Peyton’s brother’s wife who was actually the first of the whole group of New Yorkers to discover Bisbee because she was allergic to the city and Bisbee was famous for its clean air. Now that I think of it–and I just thought of it this minute–was that, one of my regrets about moving us both out to the sweet little high desert village was that by bringing our craziness to it we polluted Bisbee for good. I felt terrible guilt for that. Bisbee used to be a prosperous mining town. The Copper Queen was the name of the mine, and then the hospital, and the hotel that Kirsten stayed in, and the library, and the high school, and every other damn landmark left once the mine shut down and wiped out prosperity once and for all until the hippies finally moved in and set up shops: health food stores, cafes, bookstores, dress shops and the like. There’s a wonderful quote from the great film LA Confidential in which Kim Basinger utters the immortal words when asked what she was planning to do with the rest of her life after LA and she says, “I’m going back in a couple of years [home to Bisbee Arizona], open up a dress shop… These girls of Bisbee need a little glamour.”  

But to return, to circle back as Jen Psaki (the former Biden press secretary) used to say, to our visits to see Hobe back in the fall and winter of 2001, in an attempt to get Heather to smile or even speak. As soon as we got there Heather shut down, even with xanax. She barely said a word, she really couldn't get any words out, it seemed. But Hobe and I bonded in an odd sort of way. I remember he had food for us and I helped him serve it because he couldn't see. After we left, Heather perked back up but she was very shaken. It was very hard to be with him. Who knows what was going through her mind. Either of their minds or their bodies. We never talked about it but Hobe tried valiantly to keep the contact going. In addition to the $3000 monthly checks, he called her every single evening. Once we even tried to get together with Hobe and Tim, and Tim’s partner, but they cancelled. We waited till the morning after they found Heather to call the family–Paul actually, the older step brother rather than Hobe–to tell them what had happened. “They” meaning Kirsten and Anne L. who wouldn't let me come with them to see why no one had heard from Heather for a few days. The weekend of the Derby, actually 20 years to the day before yesterday, was a wonderful race which I made myself watch with a surprise winning odds of 80 to 1. A dark horse as they say.

But as soon as Paul was informed, the family took over and made all the arrangements like it was any ordinary death, and soon after that I flew out to LA for my book tour that Amy set up like it was just an ordinary book tour and then I came back to the city. And then I collapsed. For years. But the very dark place I found, or rather lost myself in, had really started back in Bisbee with Heather’s horrible breakdown and ultimate suicide back in New York, nine months later. The LA book tour was a brief respite from the darkness, a lovely few weeks during which I saw a lot of Amy who was living in Malibu at the time and also a lot of Anne Christine D’Adesky who had also moved west by then. They both came to all my readings and Anne in particular had attached herself in a devoted way as soon as she found out that Heather had killed herself. I must have called her that night, I don't remember. At this point she was still living in Brooklyn, Clinton Hill. She was very active in Act-Up for years and knew what to do when someone you loved died. She just got on the subway at 2 in the morning and was at my apartment by 2:30, just laying there by my side for a few hours till I fell asleep. I was still in that dark place a few years later when Notice came out and I saw on the copyright page my name next to Hobe’s when I opened the book for the first time that night at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2004, a mere two years after Heather’s suicide. 

Samantha Rosenwald

As Amy explained to me just yesterday, since Heather died without a will–of course–the copyright for Notice would necessarily go to next of kin. That would be Hobe, Heather’s father, and then after he died to her older step brother and sister from Hobe’s first marriage. But Hobe didn't want anything like that, knowing as he must have the animosity that existed if unacknowledged between Heather and her step siblings. He wasn't about to share the copyright with any of them. He loved Heather too much to let that happen. And, to be clear about a very cloudy subject, he really did love her. Always had though he sure had a dreadful way of showing it, if indeed he actually did. She usually called it “rape.” And we’ll never know. Maybe Tim knows. Tim and his partner showed up at Heather’s memorial service at a packed St Mark’s Church that summer, much to my surprise. We had never met. We embraced and never saw each other after that. Val and I even tried to find him, we planned a very unlikely scenario to barge in on him one Sunday when he was the church organist, up in Westchester, but it never happened. I for one believed that it did. Happen I mean. With Hobe I mean. The drunken assaults, I mean. Night after night, year after year, from before Heather was ten till she was in her twenties. I did not believe the manic ravings that came out of her mouth when she was full blown crazy, when she denied that he ever touched her. Like the stories of befriending Nico, of the Velvet Underground which started backstage at some little club somewhere in Jersey. Nico was wearing a brown silk dressing gown which inspired Heather to search high and low until she found one just like it. Years later to hang herself she used the belt from that brown silk robe which really did happen. For years I had that robe hanging, beltless, in my closet. I guess the Medical Examiner took it away with her that night as evidence, still, maybe wrapped around Heather’s long neck. 

After Amy published Notice, she must have sent Hobe a copy. Soon after that he wrote a long flowery letter which he sent to everyone he knew praising the genius of the book and of his beautiful daughter. There was something so totally strange to me about the letter–considering he was blind–and it left me wondering how he could possibly read the book in order to praise it so fulsomely (there! finally someone, me, is using that word correctly. Lately I’ve been noticing all these media folks using it all the time to mean just very, extremely, fully but not, as they should have, revoltingly, tastelessly, over the top, way too full. It’s one of my pet peeves). I couldn't see Hobe asking any of his children to read it to him. Maybe he had someone record it for him but that seems too creepy too. Can you imagine?! I couldn't help wondering what his dear friends, the Wallaces—Lila Acheson Wallace and her husband de Witt–thought about it all, at least about all the gossip. Maybe there was none. Maybe they never discussed it. It hardly seems like good pillow talk. De Witt was Hobe’s boss at Reader’s Digest. He was the publisher of Reader's Digest, and chief spy, if my own father was right, and Lila was a world famous philanthropist. Some of her charities were also connected to the Digest. There was a wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art named after her. She was also Heather’s godmother. Heather told me she used to fantasise about running away from her terrible home life to Lila and climbing up onto Lila’s lap and begging her to adopt her forever. 

By the time I met Hobe he was an old man without, I’m quite sure, a lecherous bone in his body. Well, if you don't count the time–shortly after I got the letter about Notice he sent to everyone in his world–two dozen red roses were delivered to my East Village apartment door. He had sent me flowers many times before, all from the same fancy florist in Rockefeller Centre. But never before was there an enclosed card, a little white card in its own little envelope. I opened it up. It said, “All my love, Heather.”

ALL THIS AND MORE IN Worms #6